JEFF WISE - Did Boeing's bad business decision make the 737 Max vulnerable to crashes?
It all comes down to
business strategy. Chicago-based Boeing is locked in a fierce duopolistic rivalry
with Toulouse-based Airbus, with whom it roughly splits the $200 billion
airliner market. The biggest segment of that market is for short- to
medium-range narrowbody jets that typically carry between 100 and 200
passengers. These are the workhorses of aviation, unglamorous and hard-ridden,
endlessly bouncing back and forth on routes like Salt Lake-Denver and La
Guardia-O’Hare.
Boeing’s entry, the
737, first flew in 1967, and though various improvements have been rolled out
over the years, at heart it’s still a creature of the Right Stuff era. Instead
of computer-controlled fly-by-wire controls, which guide a plane’s flight
electronically, it still has old fashioned mechanical actuators, and it’s made
of aluminum rather than modern lightweight composites. Airbus’ A320 family,
meanwhile, took to the skies a generation later, in 1987, but it was a
fly-by-wire, composite creature from the get go. In 2014 Airbus rolled out its
most recent iteration, the A320neo, a range of jets with engines that were
billed as being 15 percent more fuel efficient than the old model.
To maintain its lead,
Boeing had to counter Airbus’ move. It had two options: either clear off the
drafting tables and start working on a clean-sheet design, or keep the legacy
737 and polish it. The former would cost a vast amount—its last brand-new
design, the 787, cost $32 billion to develop—and it would require airlines to
retrain flight crews and maintenance personnel.
Instead, they took the
second and more economical route and upgraded
the previous iteration. Boeing swapped out the engines for new models,
which, together with airframe tweaks, promised a 20 percent increase in fuel
efficiency. In order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing
engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing. This, in
turn, affected the way the plane handled. Most alarmingly, it left the plane
with a tendency to pitch up, which could result in a dangerous aerodynamic
stall. To prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch
the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high. According to a
preliminary report, it was this system that apparently led to the Lion Air crash... read more:
